Wallpaper* October 2024: St. Vincent, Marcio Kogan and Laila Gohar are guest editors

Dear readers,

 
Much has changed since Wallpaper* first invited three vaunted individuals to guest-edit our October issue (that year, 2007, saw Hedi Slimane, Dieter Rams and Jeff Koons take up the challenge), not least the ease with which any creative can now communicate with a global audience – immediately, at pace, often on a whim.

Yet our annual offer to three leading practitioners to organise their thoughts across our multiplicity of platforms remains a constant, driven by a mutually held curiosity around what develops, and a gnawing suspicion that hyper-personalised, algorithmically alert feeds aren’t the only way to convey a singular point of view. The interdisciplinary approach has paid dividends: by taking a different tack, each of this year’s editors has illuminated areas of their work, and life, in ways that are striking in their own right yet richly complement each other.

St. Vincent, the alter ego of musician and songwriter Annie Clark, was just starting out when we debuted our annual Guest Editors’ issue in 2007. Since then, her shape-shifting as an artist has seen her move relentlessly between eras and genres, all the time playing with the carefully considered construct that she continues to recreate. It’s an entrancing journey, one that she has chosen to pick apart for us, all the while displaying the keenly critical eye that she brings to her work, as well as the contributions of others, notably the late, great Klaus Nomi and fellow artist Alex Da Corte, with whom she deconstructs the pitch-dark context of her eighth album, All Born Screaming.

By contrast, Brazilian architect Marcio Kogan chose to zoom in on a specific moment in his life that influenced all that has followed, a cinematic approach to designing that he attributes to a visit to a São Paulo cinema in his youth to watch The Silence, the third of Ingmar Bergman’s trilogy of films on the loss of religion and faith. As he tells writer Rainbow Nelson, ‘I discovered in that moment that something else exists in the world, real poetry ... It changed everything for me.’ A student’s pairing of images from that film and Kogan’s studio, MK27, has inspired the architect to create his own conversation between film and form, a mesmerising display of art and architecture in vivid concert.

Laila Gohar takes an even longer view, choosing to examine the social cohesion that is provided by the meals we eat – and the places that administer them – as a means of explaining her own drive to share and entertain. As our acting global design director, Hugo Macdonald, notes, ‘Her lens is not on the food that these places serve, as much as the feeling of hospitality they engender and the magic they inspire, which, she argues, is at the core of her mercurial practice.’ Obligingly, Gohar asked friends in the industry and her wider creative circle to relive their own perfect restaurant experience for a beautifully illustrated portmanteau of unimaginably inviting mealtimes. Gohar’s is a truly seductive course, in a wide-ranging bill of fare that you can continue to enjoy online at Wallpaper.com.

In the meantime, I would simply thank all three of our editors for coming on board – and for bringing so much of themselves to the banquet.
  

Bill Prince
Editor-in-Chief